Extending the reach of high bit rate UWB - from FTTH to household LAN

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The adoption of fibre to the home (FTTH) is shaped by many factors: cost of deployment, cost of equipment, cost of infrastructure, adoption of consumer products that drive bandwidth demand beyond competing technologies' (e.g., cable and DSL) capacity, and the client's ability to exploit FTTH services cost effectively to feed all bandwidth hungry consumer devices. In particular, the penetration of high definition television (HDTV) is pushing up bandwidth demand, as is increasingly video-based Internet content, with IPTV looming on the horizon. The willingness of consumer to subscribe to extremely high bandwidth services hinges on the capacity to feed the multiple televisions and computers distributed throughout a dwelling without pervasive, high speed LAN cabling. Current wireless standards such as 802.11 can cover an entire household, but do not have the requisite bandwidth for multiple, simultane-ous high-definition video and/or high bit rate Internet delivery. Ultra-wideband (UWB) has sufficient bandwidth (>500 Mb/s), but range that covers a room rather than a home. This project addresses the enhancement of UWB technology to achieve home-wide coverage at 500 Mb/s or greater. More importantly, we search for a systems solution that exploits the use of optical transport to gain technological and cost advantages, allowing service providers to bundle FTTH content delivery with in-home wireless distribution. Our aggressive goals for a breakthrough ten-fold extension of UWB range are particularly challenging given the regulatory environment. UWB signals are constrained to be extremely low power; in this way they can be accorded tremendously wide frequency coverage (3-10 GHz), and thus attain very high bit rates. Therefore systems must be designed for extreme power efficiency, while recognizing the importance of keeping cost low. We seek our power efficiency gains in pulse shaping to attain maximally-allowed transmission power, and in advanced RF and digital signal processing at the receiver. To keep cost low we will examine new optical sources and exploit the available PON infrastructure.